The people elected me to do this job

Chuck Wright phoned his wife from the mayor’s office on June 8, 1966, to let her know he was going to a Kiwanis Club supper in Tecumseh and would be home later. It wasn’t unusual for Wright, elected mayor a year earlier, to have his evenings filled by meetings or community events.

“I saw the skies were dark, but there was no alarm,” Wright, now 96, recalled.

A little after 7 p.m., a Kiwanis member’s wife called to warn the men a tornado was coming. Wright didn’t think anything about it until a few minutes later when a second caller said a tornado was bearing down on Topeka.

Wright tried to call the Topeka Police Department, but the phone lines were jammed. He jumped in his car and drove straight into the storm, while firefighters and police officers tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with him.

Taking detours to bypass streets blocked by felled trees and telephone poles, he arrived at the Shawnee County Courthouse, 200 S.E. 7th, and ran inside to the emergency disaster center in the sub-basement. Civil Defense director Robert Jones was waiting for him to arrive. Wright learned the tornado had left a path of rubble from S.W. 29th and Gage to Washburn University to Oakland.

Jones wanted to know how they were going to stop looting. Wright put out the word to radio stations that looters would be shot. Jones wanted to know how to keep gawkers out of tornado-decimated areas. Wright ordered that only individuals with a driver’s license showing an address in a damaged area would be permitted to enter.

Wright began assigning duties to city and county employees, as well as volunteers. Former state representative Bob Harder, director of the Topeka office of Economic Opportunity, volunteered to oversee search and rescue. Physicians and nurses flocked to the disaster center and were dispatched to areas with the most need.

Later that evening, Wright and Topeka police chief Dana Hummer drove around in an unmarked police car to assess the damage to the city. At S.W. 25th and Gage, they were stopped by a rifle-toting airman from Forbes Air Force Base. Because neither had their driver’s licenses, they were turned away.

Seeking federal help

The morning after the tornado, Wright, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, asked the Kansas Air National Guard to take him up in one of its helicopters so he could view the damage to the city. He was stunned by the swath of destruction — as if a six-block-wide lawnmower had clipped the homes, buildings and trees at ground level.

“I cried. … I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and I shed tears,” he said. “All of a sudden that was in my hands, and I had to do something for my people.”

Wright called a meeting of the American Red Cross, Salvation Army and other agencies that help during disasters to coordinate efforts. Jones interrupted the meeting, saying President Lyndon Johnson was on the phone. Johnson told the mayor he was “sorry and sorrowful” for what Topeka was experiencing and vowed he would do anything he could to help.

Wright told the president he didn’t understand “how a Republican in Kansas could receive a Democrat in Washington’s sympathy.” The president responded, “Mr. Mayor, in tragedy politics don’t count.”

In the coming weeks, Wright made a number of trips to Washington, D.C. — meeting briefly with Johnson on June 21 — and engaged in numerous telephone conversations with government officials to seek money and assistance in rebuilding the city and Washburn University.

In addition to being mayor, Wright served on the Washburn University Board of Regents. He worked with Washburn University President John Henderson to help rebuild the campus and secure mobile classrooms from the federal government.

After the classrooms had arrived, Henderson asked the mayor to see if he could get them air conditioned. So, Wright returned to Washington to meet with Florida Gov. Ferris Bryant, head of the Office of Emergency Planning, now the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I said I had only one request. It was for air-conditioning units for the trailers,” Wright said. “He responded, ‘Mr. Mayor, you’ll just have to park them under the trees.’”

Volunteers from across the country came to Topeka to help with the cleanup, serve meals to emergency workers and residents left homeless, and work in other ways to rebuild and restore the city.

When fly-by-night repairmen and contractors came to town, Wright helped establish the Better Business Bureau of Northeast Kansas to protect already-hurting citizens from unscrupulous deals.

Wright also saw an opportunity amid the rubble left behind by the tornado. In the early 1950s, the city had adopted a master traffic plan that proposed a trafficway from S.W. 29th and Gage through Philip Billard Airport to US-24 highway — basically the path carved by the twister. Wright wanted to buy all the vacant property along the route to construct the roadway. The project would cost about $7 million — money the crippled city didn’t have.

So Wright returned to Washington and met with Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin and chairman of the Senate’s Ways and Means Committee. He showed the senator a map of the tornado’s route as he pitched the idea for the trafficway and a request for a federal loan to cover its construction.

Proxmire leaned over his desk and told Wright the federal government wasn’t in the loan business. The idea for the trafficway never came to fruition.

Wright, who served as mayor until 1969, continued to work around the clock, knowing no one in Topeka was unaffected by the tornado.

“I told my wife I’d be home the next morning, but it was eight days. I’d go home, change my clothes and go back to work,” he said. “I didn’t have much choice. The people elected me to do the job, and that was it.”